Dear John McCain…

I just have one question: Is this ad supposed to make people vote for you because you’re a dick?

I know you’re jealous because people like Obama. It’s hard, being a grumpy old fratboy in an age when it’s not longer cool to pick on the smart kids. but do you have to be such a dick about it? Also, did it ever occur to you that it might actually benefit Obama to have everyone like him, and when you get sarcastic about it all of us just piture you wearing orange pants and sock garters, yelling at the nation to “get off your lawn, goddamnit!”?

Here’s the thing, Olds. Picking on Obama for being popular and for telling people that they can do a lot of energy consumption by inflating their tires just makes you look ignorant. The time for ignorant cool boy leaders has long since passed.

But the problem with the tone of this campaign is that it is distracting from the real, serious dicsussion we should be having on how to produce alternative forms of energy efficiently (in both the energy and econonic sense). and the Lexington Project? No, srsly.

How about a Manhattan project? Or better yet, let’s start doing what all the countries that have been beating the crap out of us economically for the last 20 years did- subsidize a needed, high-tech industry until it is market ready and subsidize it because it is needed and because it is good for the country. do it by granting tax incentives and loan guarantees for heavy investment in renewable energy and investing in the infrastructure to distribute it until economies of scale make it market-sustainable. Or, invest in making the military energy independent. make that priority one, since the best side benefit for contractors involved in DARPA projects is that they get to develop consumer usages for technology. But oil companies don’t want that kind of rational thinking, and they own Washington. If either candidate embraces that policy position, I’ll vote for him. got it McCain? the way you make me vote for you is not by being a dick, it’s by being the smart kid.

On a lighter note, this video is my new favorite thing ever. If you grew up McLaughlin, Rock on with your sox on!

Dear Media…

If you can use the word “lie” in any and all of its tenses and forms to describe this Edwards thing, then they all have to use the word “lie” to describe what lead us into the Iraq war and nearly anything else that eminates from the Bush administration that is clearly a lie. That also goes for anything that appears in either of the candidates ads that is clearly, baldly, maliciously, and transparently self-servingly false. and youhave to make it your headline. and you don’t get to broadcast the whole ad- you post it on your website- and you detail the lies.

I am so tired of the hubris of the media and the self-importance. see next post on Olympic coverage…

A new feature: Blogging the Journals

I’m introducing a new feature this weekend I’m calling “Blogging the Journals”, in which I take one article from a major journal in my field (American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, Asia Survey, and The Journal of East Asian Studies) and dissect it- looking for references missed, theoretical considerations overlooked, methodological innovations, big time findings, and misarticulated results. Or perhaps to give the brilliant authors a big, wet, sloppy scholarly kiss for their groundbreaking contributions to the field. After the jump, I turn to the first article in APSR’s February edition, “Cycles in American National Electoral Politics, 1854–2006: Statistical Evidence and an Explanatory Model” by Merrill, Grofman, and Brunell.

I’ve got to admit upfront- I’m skeptical of the validity of Political Cycle studies, and even more skeptical of their utility. Full citation and close reading after the jump.

Without a Doubt the Stupidest Headline in at Least a Week…

Prices Rise, but Inflation Fears Ease

“This is a fine inflation report if you don’t need to eat, drive or depend on your paycheck,” said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute in Washington and author of the recently released book, “Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed?”

the quote above is the only piece of the entire article that makes any sense. The point of the article is that CPI rose less than expected in April, but then goes on to show how all of those statistics aren’t really telling the story about inflation. Food prices are up the largest interval since 1990 (almost a percent!). Gas prices are up a lot, but not when adjusted for seasonal demand shifts.

Furthermore, the point of the article, that the Fed is encouraged by the low core inflation number, and that that somehow justifies the dangerously low fed funds rate. The problem with the low fed funds rate is that it is not going to grease the segments of the credit market that need the grease.

Now I see why Dean Baker has that enormous chip on his shoulder.

This is How Clinton Won West Virginia…

I’ll say it since no one in th media will. She won West Virginia because a lot of West Virginians are racist. A lot of the aren’t. But a lot of them are.

And I’ve got to put this out there. Clinton makes the argument that her base is the old and uneducated. How in the world is that an argument in her favor? It’s no way to build the party. Oh, and these people are voting republican at the drop of a hat in November. West Virginia is not going to go Democratic.

Happy Groundhog Day, forever. Wait! maybe there’s an upside. If the Democrats can’t get the nomination right and are therefore doomed to repeat it, we’ll never get to the general election, which means we’ll never get to the McCain first term.

Then again, that keeps us stuck in the Bush administration. Forever.

Now you see why I’m cynical?

Chinese Earthquake/Burma Relief

This from my friend Han’s blog, whose family lives in the region, and who is herself an NU trained scientist:

USGS reported the quake to be of M7.9, 90 km WNW of Chengdu. The death toll has exceeded 8000 :(…. The epicenter is located at a scenic rural area 汶川, occupied mainly by ethnic minority groups. Six years ago, I travelled there and saw a lake which was formed after some earthquake (M7.5, 1933)-induced landslides blocked the local river channel. Extremely beautiful region and extremely friendly people.

Here’s an American exchange student’s description in English from Chengdu. Here’s a video taken by a student at Sichuan University. I can’t believe at the end of the clip the psyched dude was declaring the “absolute realness” of his video with such excitement (that made my laugh—people from my hometown all tend to be a bit “off”, but in an adorable way). My parents’ house is near their university’s back yard! They’re fine!!

Donate through Chinese Red Cross: 中国红十字会总会 www.redcross.org.cn

Please give. Also, keep in mind the aid work attempting to get into Burma, where the first air shipment of American relief has just touched down.

I don’t have much to say about either, they’re just too tragic. The Burmese situation being criminally mismanaged by the dictatorial regime. This piece in Slate, however, offers the right understanding of the regime’s position but doesn’t provide any real solutions. The Coalition of the Willing, an idea woefully underdeveloped, is unlikely to work without garnering real military resistance.

But it is an interesting idea- is there any amount of “humanitarian force” that can open up a closed border? If so, can we use it in North Korea, whose citizens are likely to be facing another year of famine as food prices skyrocket in the rest of the world?

This is too depressing, I’ll have to continue later.

Well, I’m Glad I’m Not the Only One Who Thought It.

Sometimes, since I occasionally teach on racial politics, I think I am far too sensitive to race in the US. I over-react to things that are probably much less dire than my original reaction. But this really took it for me:

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.” (emphasis mine).

I’ve never been a big fan of Clinton, and until she started going after Obama with a kitchen sink, I would have voted for her. I decided then that I would stay home if it was her against McCain. But this race baiting, which has culminated in her equating “hard-working Americans” with “white Americans” just reinforces the awful stereotypes that prevent the US from having a decent anti-poverty policy (thank you, Satan… I mean, Mr. Reagan).That blacks aren’t hard-working, that they skate by doing nothing and that they are lazy and somehow not as worthy of being American as whites. Last time I checked, Mrs. Clinton, Blacks are no longer worth only 3/5ths of a human being and their votes count every bit as much as a hard-working white vote.

Well, at least I’m not the only one who thought it. Big props to one of my new favorite blogs, Reappropriate.

Congratulation Kim Byung-Kook!

I just got word that Kim Byung-kook, the President of the East Asia Institute, and a (very senior, and sadly very distant) colleague on the Chicago Council’s Public Opinion Studies in East Asia, has been asked by the new Korean President Lee Myung-bak to be South Korea’s new Senior Secretary of Foreign Affairs and National Security. Congratulations, Kim Byung–kook!

This is a very good sign for a president who, before ever entering office, has caused some serious ruckus. I’ll be totally honest, I’ve never been a big LMB fan- I didn’t care for his campaign. He’s too religious and too business-like, and his shaking up of the Korean bureacracy is interesting, but I’m not sure ultimately worth while or worth the controversy- but it shows good judgment having KBK on board.

KBK’s excellent scholarship and visions of the future of East Asia can be found in an upcoming edited volume by the East Asia Institute. I can’t link to it because it’s not out yet, and I can’t post it for the same reason. If you can get your hands on it, it’s worth a serious read.

Last night’s results and a bit of a rant

Well, I finally won my first ever office pool, and it’s not even March Madness. Yesterday, I made the following prediction on the Florida primary (actual results in parentheses):

McCain: 33% (36%)

Romney: 31% (31%)

Huckabee: 17% (14%)

9ui11iani: 15% (15%)

Paul, etc: 4% (4%)

Only off by a total of 6% points, and spot on for three out of five. Not bad for someone whose profession is polling.

The Media has taken to this being a McCain vs. Romney race, which I think will come to the surprise of a lot of Southern Evangelicals who still think they have Chuckabee to elect pastor in chief. Oh, wait- they do. Look for a Southern resurgence, possibly led by Lynard Skynard and “the Nuge”. I honestly thought Chuckabee would do better in the panhandle, where Floridians look more like actual Southerners as opposed to extra-regional transplants. I think I might over-estimate the ability of the Rock’n’Roll Reverend to get the evangelicals off their butts. I’m going to stand by that over-estimation, though, in part because I begrudgingly like the guy. His politics horrify me – and his way of going about it is insane – but he has a sense of humor. And I like that.

The McCain win, I think, with the exception of Southern Evangelicals who have never liked the man, signals what reporters have been looking for all along: the emergence of a candidate behind whom Republicans can fall in line. McCain is most definitely going to be taking his Social Conservative credentials (such as they are) and attempting to flaunt them. It will be interesting to see where the Pat Buchannans in the party go. The only orthodox Republican left in the race is Romney, and no one trusts him (though it seems like the establishment wants to). Chuckabee is too fiscally liberal and has zero foreign policy experience. That’s bad for the GOP of war and *ahem* balanced budgets. A former fatty who wants to give money to the poor and raise your taxes is not going to win in the West or Northeast, no matter how much sending Chuck Norris to kick Mexican ass will appeal to the xenophobic wing of America’s “big tent” party.

McCain is a budget hawk and a war hawk, but with an increasingly unpopular war (the numbers of those who say the American loss of life has been worth it are still going down despite the “success” of the surge), an increasingly unmanageable deficit and debt (and Fed, but that’s for a different day), and McCains libertarian social views, he’s going to have to rely an awful lot on his biography and on the residual fear from terror that requires a cantankerous old coot to get elected (no offense to any McCain supporters in this chain- sometimes I like his coot-i-ness, but he lost me with his cover of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann”). Not that anyone has ever lost an election relying too much on their impressive Vietnam-era war hero biography.

So, on to Super Tuesday. I’m looking forward to watching the returns with a bunch of students, but given my pessimism about the outcome, I don’t look forward to their disappointed faces at 3AM.

In case it was ever unclear, I am an Obama supporter – and I’ll blog about why (in an uncharacteristically positive manner) sometime before Feb 5th – but I hold out little hope for the new JFK in media climate that refuses to acknowledge the weakness, pettiness, and tackiness of the Clinton candidacy.

Clinton’s “Victory Party” in Florida last night got the media attention she wanted but did not deserve for coming in first in a primary that doesn’t count and was never contested in the state. It was a juvenile display in transparently poor taste, the opposite of sour grapes: “Boy, I bet Barack would love some of my sweet Florida delegates, they taste so gooooooood… mnamph mnamph mnamph”, but when she looks up, she’s still holding nothing.

Her advocacy last night for allowing the Florida delegates to be admitted to sit at the convention makes a certain amount of sense – why disenfranchise a state the Dems might find invaluable in the future? – but the message of the campaign is really more like Joe Lieberman: “To hell with what the party wants, even if it is in our long term interests! I will do whatever it takes to get myself elected!” Sadly, she thinks this makes her a fighter and strong. I think it makes her weak and petty, and unfit for leadership when “the vision thing” is what is really going to matter.

Her (and her surrogates’) perfidy and willingness to violate Reagan’s law (thou shalt not speak ill of your fellow [Democrats]) in the most appalling and underhanded of ways makes her an unacceptable throwback candidate to the rough-and-tumble 1990s in a race that has the potential to look forward and bring American policy more inline with the actual views of Americans.

Her eagerness to placate the right with fake issues like flag-burning and obscenity in music, movies, and TV ring very much of her husband’s failures for gays and in reshaping welfare as we knew it. She can not be trusted not to sell out the Democratic party, the progressive agenda, or some presumably loyal sliver of either for her own political gain, even if her victory accompanies setback or the substanceless appearance of success.

Her foreign policy positions amount to Bush-lite posturing, and her eagerness to prove that she’s tough will get us into some of the same problems we have with the current administration. Refusing to talk to world leaders is again, a sign of pettiness, not strength and misunderstands critically how problems are actually solved. This type of foreign policy does not make one ready for the job “on day one”. I’d be concerned for a kindergartener exhibiting the same behavior.

The experience canard is perhaps her most galling. It’s going to be tough being the first female president with balls that big.

Political Discourse

If this is what passes for discourse in the presidential race in perhaps the most important election since the election of FDR, please don’t question me when I say i want to work outside of this country. I love the good ole USofA, but this is the reverse of democratization. Yes, I understand that celebrities can be serious political figures- for instance Mr. Khan in Pakistan. However, the language of this endorsement has nothing to do with Mr. Huckabee’s actual policy positions. He’s merely showing off his pet Neanderthal and their shared paleopolitics of who can be more macho. It’s even labeled “An Important Policy Message from Mike Huckabee”. Positively. Nauseating.

Lest you think me content to heap disdain upon the realities of modern politics without offering some sort of actual critique, here’s my go:

In my dissertation proposal, I set out different stages of democratization as they relate to public opinion and democratic politics. The final stage is a policy or ideology-based political discourse, rather than a fitness to govern discourse. What we have here is a contentless discourse, catering to our “lizard brains” and not our rational, “enlightened” selves. When this happens, we’ve already abnegated our decision making power by not demanding good information.

Also, does this mean that Mike Huckabee’s immigration policy is to have Chuck Norris kick some immigrant ass? I hope so.